Hacker News Reader

Comment by not_kurt_godel | Hacker News Reader

> A web application or a website, by its very nature, is a series of small requests. When someone sends all requests in one big lump of a page, they have just defeated this very important architecture.

This whole take is just bizarre. Literally none of this matters to users except to the extent that it affects performance. While I would agree that many/most SPAs are implemented extremely poorly and inefficiently for reasons relating to what you're talking about it, and that that poorness spans both technical faults and UX problems, it's a very myopic view to complain that the foremost function of the web should be to rigidly adhere to a particular set of architectural patterns that are in flux and often outdated by modern standards.

View on HN

> Literally none of this matters to users

Being able to bookmark deep links matters. I've worked places where users complained they couldn't bookmark their work because everything is just "the page".

That's the fault of the application developers, not SPAs in general. SPAs support routing, for instance if you are using React router it uses the browser's history API to add the navigated pages to the history and to change the path that appears for the users, if a user then bookmarks that page when they reopen it react router and co should take him back to the same area of the app they were in before.

Not defending SPAs, just pointing out that they are not to blame for this.

If your web page has to reimplement basic web browser functionality, like scrolling, or the back button, or linking, you have strayed far from the path to wisdom.

>Literally none of this matters to users except to the extent that it affects performance.

Yeah, just render my browser's back button dysfunctional, fam. Doesn't matter to me at all. Take all my control away and lock me into your walled garden of totally custom, approved-only interactions.

Do you care about your back button because it's an architectural principle of the web, or because it provides a useful function? Go back and read my comment carefully and you'll probably realize you're arguing against a strawman.

> Literally none of this matters to users

Users prefer the hypertext model to opaque blobs.

ask any user what "hypertext" is and you'll get a confused look; similarly, give them a black-on-white, no-css page and they'll think it looks quite ugly and isn't a good experience. spas are commonly horrible to use but restricting everything to the model of the internet as it existed in the 80s is not a good thing either

Just because my mother in law doesn't use the word hypertext doesn't mean she doesn't know how to use a link, and isn't frustrated when some places can't do it.

99% don't know how anything works, but they still have preferences.

Hypertext doesn't have to break with SPAs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com